There are plenty of other sites on which travellers can search for fares, probably too many, but this one has some features that help it stand out.

One of the features they are promoting is the fare estimator which helps you figure out what the real price of a flight ticket will be. One of the biggest annoyances of shopping for airfares, and there are many, is the lack of clarity on pricing.

Airlines can advertise just about any price they want, usually something ridiculously low that has no resemblance to the price you will actually pay.

On the TripAdvisor.ca site, I tried a fare from Montreal to London in June. The best it could come up with was a return flight for $429, although it informed me that the actual price would be more like $1,001 with the additional levies I’d have to pay.

Not surprisingly, Expedia.ca offered similar prices within $50 of the TripAdvisor site. I say not surprisingly, because Expedia owns TripAdvisor.

Kayak.com also displayed similar prices so maybe the fee estimator is not such a big deal, but TripAdvisor does have other features.

One of site’s strengths is the user reviews it offers. It’s flight search engine incorporates user reviews for airlines if that is a criterion for how you select a flight. It also has links to SeatGuru reviews to help you reserve the best seats on your plane, something that is especially useful for long-haul flights.

Oh, Canada, oh, no, look what South Park hath wrought now. The horror, the shame, the pity, the sheer humiliation of it all.

Monarchists, Royal Wedding groupies and Canadian Royal watchers everywhere have extra reason to wince in nervous anticipation.

South Park, the scurrilous, foul-mouthed cartoon satire to which no cow is too sacred, no four-letter word too uncouth and no anti-social behaviour too inappropriate, is about to trash the Royal Wedding in Wednesday’s episode, titled “Royal Pudding.”

And Canada, our fair home and native land, is going to be right in the crosshairs.

The fairy-tale story picks up with the Prince of Canada about to wed his dearly beloved before a coterie of adoring fans, while on TV, “literally thousands” are watching.

Before the dashing young Prince has a chance to say, “I do,” though, dastardly knaves abduct the Princess-to-be, sending shockwaves of panic from Prince Rupert to St. John’s.

All Canadians across this great land are called upon to step up and save the Princess bride — those who aren’t watching the Canucks make a hash out of the Western Conference final, that is — and rescue the damsel in her hour of distress.

South Park has maintained a love-hate relationship with Canada and all things Canadian over the years, as longtime South Park acolytes and devotees. The drawing of Canadian characters is deliberately crude, even by South Park’s already crude standards.

Most things Canada or Canadian are depicted as having hard, straight edges: Canadians and all things Canada appear in the form of squares and rectangles.

No less authoritative a source than Wikia says South Park’s animators portray Canadians as having “oval shaped floppy heads with black beady eyes. The rest of their bodily layout is … rectangular and straight.”

But wait, there’s more.

“They speak with an exaggerated accent,” Wikia continues, “and usually end all of [sic] their sentences with ‘Eh,’ ‘Buddy,’ ‘Guy,’ or ‘Friend.’ They also pronounce ‘about’ as ‘aboot.'”

Oddly enough, the site goes on to say, Alanis Morissette [misspelled as Morrisette], Tom Green, the performers in Cirque du Cheville and Justin Bieber are not depicted with oval shaped floppy heads, nor do they have black beady eyes. Which makes them, in South Park’s eyes, only half Canadian.

Ike Broflovski, the language-capable/verbally enabled adopted brother of South Park regular Kyle Broflovski, is Canadian, of course, as are the animated ‘toon-within-a-‘toon duo Terrance and Phillip.

The lyrics to the Oscar-nominated tune Blame Canada, from Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s 1999 feature film South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, feature such bon mots as, “They’re not even a real country anyway,” and, “Blame Canada/Blame Canada/With all their hockey hullabaloo/And that [lovely lady] Anne Murray, too.”

To the songwriters’ credit — and in the interests of balance and fairness — the song ends with the lyric, “We [Americans] must blame them and cause a fuss/Before somebody thinks of blaming us.”

Touché.

Of course, early images from the South Park royal wedding — the episode itself was unavailable for preview, for obvious reasons — show that “the Prince and soon-to-be-Princess of Canada” look identifiably Canadian, with their oval shaped floppy heads and beady black eyes.

There’s one obvious misstep, though. Nobody in the wedding party, or the adoring throng in the background, appears to be wielding a hockey stick. That won’t do. That just won’t do.

Cannes Film Festival: Eve of Day 1 (2)

Not everything is brand new at the Cannes film festival; there’s a lot of history to mine. For instance, the painstaking restoration of A Trip To The Moon, a 1902 silent film — 14 minutes long, which was pretty long for those days — made by Georges Meiles. He was a movie pioneer and A Trip To The Moon is considered his masterpiece.

The black-and-white versions of the film has been shown many times, but Melies also made a colour version, and that is the one that has been salvaged, all 13,375 frames of it, a job that took 10 years. It’s being presented during opening night of the festival, 109 years afer its first release.

Melies (1861-1938) was a magician, theatre director, inventor and newspaper cartoonist, as well as a filmmaker. He attended the first public performance of the new invention of the Limiere brothers, the “cinematogaph,” in 1895, and was amazed by what he saw. He invented his own machine, called the Kinetograph, and went on to direct, produce, star in, edit, design and distribute an astounding 520 movies. His film Vanishing Lady at Robert-Houdin’s Place, which used trick cinematography by stopping the camera, was the beginning of “special effects” in film.

Along with his other movies (which included a dramatization of the Dreyfus Affair), his most famous was A Trip To The Moon, which was so successful that it was plagiarized in the U.S. It told the story of a group of six scientists who take a bullet rocket to the moon — they hit the man in the moon right in the eye — meet the moon creatures called Selenites, then escape and then return to Earth to great acclaim.

The black-and-white version of the film survived Melies act of folly — he tried to burn all his negatives — but the hand-coloured version was considered lost until it was rediscovered in 1993 in Barcelona. A private film collector donated it to a film organization. A company called Lobster Films had to peel and unroll a delicate nitrate print, frame by frame, and digitize it. It took two years to extract the fragments and another eight years to store it on a hard drive. It was restored at a Technicolor laboratory in Los Angeles, a project supervised by director Tim Burton.

Cannes Film Festival: Eve of Day 1

It’s a glorious spring in Cannes this year, the ashy residue of that Icelandic volcano just a bad memory for people who got stuck in Europe — “two days in Madrid,”an American journalist complained to me today, as if he’d been held prisoner by the Taliban — on the way to and from the film festival. There’s a morning haze in the air over the Croisette, but it burns off in time for the street vendors to materialize, selling straw hats of the type that not only won’t look very good when you get home, but don’t even look very good here. Teenagers walk up from the public beach to buy $3 cafes at the Croisette food stands — pretty good price, when you consider that they throw in a view of the yachts bobbing offshore on the blue sea, keeping in mind that in the late 1990s, a floating bordello was anchored offshore — and across the boulevard, workmen hammer up signs and movie posters that decorate the pastel Riviera hotels every year at this time.

There’s a bright mood in the air, brought on by a lack of ash — if you can ignore the smokers on the patios — and what the festival calls the “sophisticated and timeless elegance” of Faye Dunaway, whose black-and-white poster presides over the festival headquarters like the eyes of Dr. T. J. Echelburg in The Great Gatsby. Dunaway (photographed in 1970 by Jerry Schatzberg, whose Puzzle of Downfall Child is a special screening at this year’s festival) gives the beachfront a tone of retro glamour that clashes merrily with the random idiosyncrasies — the offbeat merry-go-round, the so-called “cat juggler” who poses with his felines for money — along the beach.

It’s a nutty kind of mood: Cannes has expanded its footprints-in-the-concrete walk of fame, for instance, so that as you enter the Palais, you can see the handprints of Wong Kar Wai, Julie Andrews, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Catherine Deneuve, Meg Ryan and others, a strange collection of legends, auteurs, and moderately famous people. It’s hard to say how these things are chosen, but that’s all part of the charm. In a reminiscence of “Cannes craziest moments,” the Hollywood Reporter is looking back n the day when, for instance, someone throw a shaving-cream pie in the face of Jean-Luc Godard because they didn’t like his 1985 film Hail Mary, or the night in 1990 when Jeffrey Katzenberg became so incensed at the slow service at the famous Le Moulin de Mougins restaurant that he barricaded the kitchen and said, “No one eats until I get served my dinner.”

Blame the annual confluence of power, money, fame, and a certain brand of European movie madness. The films haven’t started yet — and it looks like a wonderful year, by the way — but the sunlight is burning away the the last vestiges of ordinary life. You can feel the madness is about to begin, and you only hope the everyone remembers that Faye Dunaway is watching.

As President Gerry Cahill put it: “We are not upscale. We are Middle America offering value at our price point. We know our market and we intend to stick with it.”

The RedFrog Pub proved to be the most fun with its branded beer, which ran dry the second day, making it necessary to fly in reinfreshments.

The new Cucina Del Capitano restaurant was good when it comes to tasty Italian food. We had a four-course dinner right off the menu for $10.

Steaks and seafood hit the park at Prime Steakhouse ($30).

The Sports Square with the rope park, water slide and water-related events will be a hit, as will the barbecue on sea days outside the RedFrog.

There was lots of night activity. The only disappointment was the main showroom, where the major production number was not available in the early going. Don’t blame the act…the room was the last to be finished, cutting off rehearsal time.

The Serenity area (below) on Deck 11 at the bow is a great place to get away from the kids — it’s adult only.

Overall, the Magic is a job well done. The ship is now based in Barcelona for the summer before sailing out of Galveston on a permanent, year-round basis.

The best way to describe Carnival is that it is the mass-market brand — priced for the market with some good service to boot.

Back to reality tomorrow.

All for now.

Enjoy reading about cruising? Check out cruisingdoneright.com, written Monday to Friday by the Ports and Bows team.